Tag: Jack Ryan

“Jack Ryan” showrunner Carlton Cuse will take a step back from the Amazon series for Season 3, TheWrap has learned.

Cuse, who has helmed the adaptation through its first two seasons, will step down from day-to-day responsibilities for the recently ordered third season to instead focus on his upcoming Netflix series “Locke & Key.”

“Jack Ryan,” a series adaptation of the popular Tom Clancy novels, was picked up for a third season by Amazon last month, well ahead of the show’s return for Season 2.

Cuse co-created the series with former “Lost” writer Graham Roland. He is expected to remain attached to the series as an executive producer, and a search is currently underway for his replacement as showrunner.

The series is described as a “reinvention” of the Tom Clancy hero played by John Krasinski, who also executive produces. The series sees the former “Office” star step into the role that’s been inhabited previously in films by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. Though unlike those other four, the Amazon series is not a direct adaptation of any specific Clancy novel.

In Season 2, Krasinski will be joined by Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”), who will reprise his role as John Greer in the eight-episode run, along with new cast members Michael Kelly, Noomi Rapace and John Hoogenakker.

“Jack Ryan” is produced by Paramount Television, Cuse’s Genre Arts, Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes and David Ellison’s Skydance Television. Along with Cuse, Roland and Krasinski, Platinum Dune’s Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller also executive produce.

Lindsey Springer, Mace Neufeld, Vince Calandra, Andrew Bernstein and Skydance’s Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross will executive produce the second season with Allyson Seeger as a co-executive producer.

Carlton Cuse will not be returning as showrunner for season three of “Jack Ryan,” Variety has learned. The former “Lost” helmer will stay on as Executive Producer, and Amazon has launched a search to find a replacement showrunne…

Jack Ryan is coming back for a third season.
Jennifer Salke, Head of Amazon Studios revealed that the John Krasinski-fronted poltical thriller is back for a third run at TCA. She said that following the success of the first season and its creative on s…

Ahead of its season 2 debut, Amazon has renewed “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” for a third season.

Jennifer Salke, Head of Amazon Studios made the announcement Wednesday during the television critics association press tour.

The series is a “reinvention” of Tom Clancy novelistic hero played by John Krasinski, who also executive produces. The pseudo-adaptation sees the former “Office” star step into the role that’s been inhabited previously in films by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine. Though unlike those other four, the Amazon series is not a direct adaptation of any specific Clancy novel.

Last April, a few months before its series premiere, Amazon gave “Jack Ryan” a second season. Season 1 was released on August 31.

In Season 2, Krasinski will be joined by Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”), who will reprise his role as John Greer in the eight-episode run, along with new cast members Michael Kelly, Noomi Rapace and John Hoogenakker.

The show is executive produced by co-showrunners and creators Carlton Cuse and Graham Roland, and comes from Paramount Television and Skydance Television.

“Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” is produced by Paramount Television, Cuse’s Genre Arts, Michael Bay‘s Platinum Dunes and David Ellison’s Skydance Television. Along with Cuse, Roland and Krasinski, Platinum Dune’s Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller will also executive produce. Lindsey Springer, Mace Neufeld, Vince Calandra, Andrew Bernstein and Skydance’s Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross will executive produce the second season with Allyson Seeger as a co-executive producer.

Michael B Jordan’s “Without Remorse” is gaining steam at Paramount as “Sicario: Day of the Soldado” director Stefano Sollima is in talks to direct the studio’s adaptation of the Tom Clancy novel, an individual with knowledge of the project tells TheWrap.

Jordan will play John Clark, the head of Rainbow Six and a close ally of Clancy’s most famous creation, Jack Ryan. Clark was previously played on the screen by by Willem Dafoe in 1994’s “Clear and Present Danger,” and by Liev Schreiber in the 2002’s “The Sum of All Fears.” “Without Remorse” serves as an origin story for the character, a former Navy SEAL who joins the CIA after waging a vendetta against a drug smuggling organized crime outfit.

Akiva Goldsman will produce the film. Jordan will also produce with Josh Appelbaum and Corin Nemec.

“Without Remorse” is currently planned as part of a series to be followed by an adaptation of Clancy’s “Rainbow Six.” The series will mark the second currently-ongoing production based on Tom Clancy’s characters and concepts, following Amazon prime’s
Jack Ryan,” which stars John Krasinski.

Along with “Without Remorse,” Sollima is also attached to Activision’s upcoming “Call of Duty” movie.

“Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” the Amazon original starring John Krasinski which launched in August, attracted nearly 40 percent of Prime Video users in the first month after its premiere, according to new data from 7Park Data shared exclusively with TheWrap.

According to 7Park, 37 percent of Amazon Video viewers watched the series last month, which is well above the average audience share of 9 percent.

A rep for Amazon Prime did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Part of the reason for the high percentage of viewers tuning in to “Jack Ryan” for its first month had to do with the series premiere, which took place August 31. Because it’s common for users to binge-watch a season as soon as its released, most new series experience a spike in viewership within the first week after their premiere.

The same trend can be seen with seasons 1 and 2 of “The Grand Tour” when taking a look at the 7Park graph below.

Provided by 7Park Data

This is the first time 7Park has tracked Amazon data. While the company has been tracking viewership metrics of both Hulu and Netflix, today it announced the addition of Amazon Prime Video viewership data to its Streaming Intelligence data product.

The new offering includes valuable insights into streaming behavior in more than 50 countries. 7Park Data’s Streaming Intelligence aims to help its clients better understand audience behavior in order to make better decisions about development, licensing, and marketing.

“We were eager to use comprehensive, actionable viewership information on the three largest SVOD platforms — Hulu, Netflix and Amazon — and for better answers to ‘black box’ questions that can only come from a representative sample of actual viewing subscribers in the U.S. and around the world,” said Donna Murphy, SVP, Discovery Inc.’s Consumer Insights & Culture Lab.

“7Park Data gives us a better understanding of how our content and that of our competitors is performing and empowers us to make more strategic data-driven decisions about the kinds of content we’re producing for viewers and what content consumers are drawn to.”

John Krasinski is more than just an adorable smile with amazing comedic timing. Actually, he would like you to forget all about his comedy days, as he’s a real action hero now. And to prove it, he beat up Stephen Colbert on Tuesday’s episode of “The Late Show.”

This all started because the bearded CBS late-night host actually goaded the “Jack Ryan” star into “punching” him in the face. And Colbert managed to get “The Office” alum to deck him by first teasing him into doing 10 pushups to prove he’s an action guy now, saying “Comedy guys like me and you aren’t meant to do action,” and then telling him “a real action guy wouldn’t do push-ups just because I told him to.”

Colbert — who insisted he’d be an action star too right now if he hadn’t lost the title role in “Blade” to Wesley Snipes 20 years ago — tells Krasinski, “A real action guy would punch me in the face.” Wait, Jim Halpert isn’t going to fight Colbert and trash the “Late Show” set, no matter how much of a jerk he’s being, right?

What followed was a 5-minute long (totally not choreographed) fight sequence that takes the pair backstage, into an elevator with Krasinski’s old “The Office” co-star Ellie Kemper, and up to the roof, where one of them throws the other off.

(Warning: This story contains spoilers from the first season of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan”)

Co-showrunners Graham Roland and Carlton Cuse wanted to bring something to “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” on Amazon that hasn’t been seen too often on screen: Three-dimensional portrayals of Middle Eastern characters.

“Any great villain is kind of the hero in his own mind, is complicated and layered,” Roland tells TheWrap of his series that premiered Friday night. “We definitely wanted to bring that to a Middle Eastern terrorist, which is something that we haven’t seen before on film.”

Roland served in the U.S. Marine Corps from 2000 to 2006 and was deployed to Iraq for one tour. That experience had a hand in shaping how Roland and Cuse depicted the show’s Middle Eastern characters. Although the antagonist, Mousa bin Suleiman (played by Ali Suliman), is compared by John Krasinski’s Ryan to Osama bin Laden during the first episode, Roland and Cuse took a more nuanced approach to writing him and the other Arab characters.

“I felt like there wasn’t a huge difference between them, and their goals and what they wanted for their families and for themselves, and what we want for ourselves here in the U.S.,” said Roland. “I just felt like that line wasn’t as drastic as its portrayed to be often times.”

During the opening scene, a young boy (which is revealed at the end of the episode to be Suleiman as a child) is dancing around his room with his brother to Men at Work’s “Safety Dance” (the scene takes place in 1983). “[We were] sort of trying to erase the line a little bit between us and them,” said Roland. There’s also a scene early on where Suleiman’s family is playing Monopoly.

Suleiman’s side of the story is given about as much of the narrative attention as Ryan’s, with the first episode serving as a build up of sorts to his reveal. Dina Shihabi’s Hanin, the wife of Suleiman, becomes integral to the CIA’s goal of stopping Suleiman after she runs away with their three kids. In fact, much of Suleiman’s storyline is told through her perspective.

Suleiman and his younger brother, Ali (Haaz Sleiman), we find out, have been orphaned after U.S. planes dropped bombs near their village in Lebanon, and they end up growing up in France. Through flashbacks we see multiple instances of French people’s racism towards Suleiman and his brother, which make the stakes feel a bit more personal versus the stereotypical terrorist character.

“Sometimes we’re victim of circumstance, but we don’t start out from that different of a place,” said Roland.

Outside of a small scene during a flashback of Jack Ryan’s days in Afghanistan, where a small boy would take a picture with a Polaroid then charge Ryan for it, nothing specific from his experience made it into the narrative. “It’s just a nod to it, really.”

The first season of Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” show is finally here, with John Krasinski being the fifth actor to take on the role. So it feels like a good time to look back at every Jack Ryan and figure out who did it best.
5. Chris Pine
T…

There’s a particularly, hmm, interesting bit in the midsection of Amazon’s new “Jack Ryan” show, in which main villain Suleiman (Ali Suliman) in Syria uses the chat feature in an online video game to communicate secretly with his brother (Haaz Sleiman) in France. Later, Jack Ryan (John Krasinski) himself tries to use the same game to trick Suleiman into revealing his dastardly plans by pretending to be that same brother.

So this video game — which is not a real game, for the record, and was clearly created for the show — plays an important part of the story “Jack Ryan” tells. If you’re wondering whether that is actually a thing that terrorists do in the real world, using video games to communicate and coordinate, well, the answer is probably not.

Now if you’ve been hanging around on the internet for a while you might think you’ve heard about Islamic terrorists using “World of Warcraft” or private messaging on PlayStation 4 to set stuff up. But, in fact, there is no publicly available evidence that terrorists have used video games as a way to secretly communicate.

But there are two reasons you might think they have. The first is that among the many documents leaked by Edward Snowden back in 2013 was a report about the NSA, CIA and other agencies setting up counter-terrorism surveillance teams inside “World of Warcraft” and “Second Life,” among other online games. But the key bit of information in those documents was that they never accomplished anything with those teams.

The second reason is an erroneous report after the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris that linked the attackers to the use of a PlayStation 4 system. The report featured a cavalcade of mistakes, most notably that it misconstrued a statement made by the Belgian interior minister three days before those attacks — in which he claimed that terrorists love the PS4 because it’s more secure than WhatsApp, which is not actually true — as being about the attacks themselves, since the attackers lived in Belgium. It was also reported that a PS4 was found in one of the attackers’ apartments, which as far as anyone can tell was a made-up detail.

So, it appears that “Jack Ryan” is playing on a bit of internet myth when it comes to this alleged ripped-from-the-headlines detail.

In honor of the premiere of John Krasinski’s new action series, “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” Funny or Die has made an epic mashup video that combines the Amazon adaptation with NBC’s “The Office” — which, as you know, starred Krasinski as the lovable Jim Halpert and Rainn Wilson as Dwight, his biggest frenemy at paper company Dunder Mifflin.

Dwight was a man who always tried to be recruited by the CIA and in the Funny or Die universe, Schrute is a legit terrorist who “Jim Ryan” now needs to protect his co-workers from.

Things get way more intense in the office than they ever did on the sitcom — and yes, we’re counting the episode where Dwight pelted Jim with snowballs until Jim looked like he wanted to die.

On Friday, Amazon premieres the first season of its eight-episode drama based on the famed character from Clancy’s novels. The pseudo-adaptation will see Krasinski step into the role that’s been previously played in films by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine (no pressure, John!). Unlike most of those films, which were straight adaptations of specific Clancy novels, Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” is an original story by Carlton Cuse and his co-showrunner Graham Roland, imbibed with the Tom Clancy DNA.

In a TV world full of antiheroes, Tom Clancy’s famous novel character, Jack Ryan, is a throwback to an era when protagonists didn’t spend so much time living in a morally grey area.

“I don’t think people would want to see him be a Jason Bourne antihero,” Carlton Cuse, co-showrunner of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan,” tells TheWrap, adding that there’s “an expectation” for what kind of character he can be. “That kind of re-imagining was just not on the table for us.”

On Friday, Amazon premieres the first season of its eight-episode drama based on the famed character from Clancy’s novels. The pseudo-adaptation will see John Krasinski step into the role that’s been inhabited previously in films by Alec Baldwin, Harrison Ford, Ben Affleck and Chris Pine (no pressure, John!). But unlike most of those films, which were straight adaptations of specific Clancy novels, Amazon’s “Jack Ryan” is a wholly original story by Cuse and his co-showrunner Graham Roland, imbibed with the Tom Clancy DNA.

“When you read a Clancy novel you felt like you were really going inside the military and inside the intelligence community,” Cuse continued. “In our version, he’s more of a modern millennial, and the way John Kraskinski plays him kind of embodies a lot of contemporary masculine qualities.”

Ever since James Gandolfini made viewers root for mob boss Tony Soprano, television has been chock full of leads of questionable morality. Roland argued that’s what made Jack Ryan so enticing. “Coming out of this era of TV antiheroes, we thought it was an interesting opportunity to bring back a classic hero whose moralism is often tested by the world he exists in.”

Krasinski is best known for his role as the camera smirking, prank-pulling paper salesman Jim Halpert from NBC’s “The Office.” Though he’s taken more harder-edge roles recently, most notably in Michael Bay’s “13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi,” where he played a former Navy SEAL. He also starred in and directed horror-thriller hit “The Quiet Place.”

While Cuse said they tried to craft their own version of Jack Ryan, they used Ford’s portrayal in “Patriot Games” and “Clear and Present Danger” as inspiration.

“We loved the Harrison Ford version. We just tried to tailor it to who John is,” he said. “I think of some of the other incarnations are more stoic, a little more reserved. John brings kind of an elemental humanism. We tried to lean into those things.”

In fact, Cuse said they initially were going to do a more straight adaptaion of “Clear and Present Danger,” which focuses on a covert war being conducted behind Ryan’s back against a Colombian drug cartel. “It just felt like it was falling flat. Because really we felt like this story was dated,” said Cuse.

“It had to feel like something that was current to the world that we live in,” added Roland.

The first season of the show sees Krasinski’s Ryan, still in the early days of his career as a CIA analyst, get thrust into the field after he uncovers a string of dubious bank transfers. In typical Tom Clancy-esque fashion, it leads him on a globe-trotting adventure through Europe and the Middle East, as he uncovers a growing terrorist threat bent on carrying out an attack on the U.S.

Amazon has already renewed the series for a second season, which is currently in production in South America. It will be a completely new storyline, with Ryan dealing with a dangerous, and declining, democratic regime in South America. Roland said that the ability to tell their own self-contained Clancy-esque stories was among the things that threw them to the project.

“We liked the films a great deal but really what intrigued us about doing it for Amazon, and doing it over an eight-hour period, was doing something more novelistic.”

The entire eight-episode first season of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” drops on Amazon Friday.

A CIA agent made famous by one of America’s best-known spy novelists has been tasked with a very special mission — turning around one of streaming TV’s most massive ships. The new series “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan” predates the planned pivot by new Amazon…

Four weeks before it’s series premiere, Amazon is already filling out its cast for season two of “Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan.”

The online retail giant announced on Monday that Jovan Adepo, Jordi Molla, Cristina Umaña and Francisco Denis will join the series for season two. The quartet joins John Krasinski, who plays the titular character, Noomi Rapace, Michael Kelly and John Hoogenakker.

Season two will see Jack Ryan confront the forces in power in a dangerous, declining democratic regime in South America. Wendell Pierce will also return for season two as James Greer.

Molla will play Nicolas Reyes, the powerful and charismatic leader of the South American country, while Denis will play one of the country’s senior government officials, Ubarri. Adepo will play Marcus, a former special crewman in the Navy now repairing boats, whose life takes a turn when an old colleague offers him a critical position in a covert operation. Umaña will play Gloria Bonalde, which Amazon describes as “a woman who fearlessly balances her career in politics with the demands of motherhood.”

Season two of the series is a co-production with Paramount Television and Skydance Television. Executive producing with Cuse, Roland and Krasinski are Platinum Dune’s Michael Bay, Andrew Form and Brad Fuller and Cuse’s Genre Arts. Additionally, Lindsey Springer, Mace Neufeld, Vince Calandra, Andrew Bernstein and Skydance’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross will also executive produce the second season with Allyson Seeger serving as a co-executive producer.

In today’s roundup, Amazon Prime releases the trailer for new series “Forever” and announces Michael Kelly as a “Jack Ryan” series regular for Season 2. FIRST LOOKS Amazon Prime has released the first trailer for “Fo…

The “House of Cards” star will join John Krasinski, Noomi Rapace and John Hoogenakker in the Amazon drama based on Tom Clancy’s books. He will play Mike November, who is described as “a smart, seasoned career field officer in the CIA who works with both Jack Ryan and Jim Greer across the new season.”

Krasinski stars as the titular CIA officer, while Rapace will play the series regular role of Harriet “Harry” Baumann, a highly capable, sharply intelligent and intoxicatingly charming BND (Germany’s Secret Intelligence) agent, who crosses paths with Jack Ryan in South America. Hoogenakker will play Matice, a tough and salty American who works black ops for the CIA. At first skeptical of what appears to be a desk-jockey, he quickly develops a new respect for Jack Ryan after seeing him handle himself in the field.

The drama will also feature Wendell Pierce (“The Wire”) as James Greer and Abbie Cornish (“Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri”) as Cathy Mueller.

Co-creators and co-showrunners Carlton Cuse (“Lost,” “Bates Motel”) and Graham Roland (“Fringe,” “Prison Break”), executive produce with Krasinski and director Morten Tyldum. Executive producing with Michael Bay and Platinum Dunes are Andrew Form and Brad Fuller, who both worked with Krasinski on “A Quiet Place.” Daniel Sackheim, Mace Neufeld and Skydance’s David Ellison, Dana Goldberg and Marcy Ross also executive produce the series, with Lindsey Springer and Allyson Seeger serving as a co-executive producers. Paramount Television and Skydance Television co-produce.